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Language Log
"Lost" languages?
The use of the word lost in this recent story caught my attention — Pankaj Doval, "Google set to revive lost Indian languages", The Times of India 10/3/2024:
As it gets deeper into India with generative AI platform Gemini and other suite of digital offerings, Google has taken up a new task in hand – reviving some of the lost Indian languages and creating digital records and online footprint for them.
I'll say more later about Google's important and interesting contribution to an important and interesting problem. But first, what does the article mean by "lost Indian languages"? I started from the idea that languages that are "lost" are extinct, i.e. no longer spoken — and a web search for the phrase "lost languages" confirms that others have the same interpretation.
However, the Times of India article makes it clear that this is not what they mean:
The idea is to enable people to easily carry out voice or text searches in their local dialects and languages.
As the work moves towards completion, people in the hinterland and various regions can easily do voice search in their own languages to gain accurate and valuable information from, say, Google's Gemini AI platform or carry out live translations, harness YouTube better to target their communities.
The project has so far reached 59 Indian languages, including 15 that currently do not have any kind of a digital footprint and were rather declining in usage.
The project has so far reached 59 Indian languages, including 15 that currently do not have any kind of a digital footprint and were rather declining in usage.
And the article includes this graphic, listing 8 of those 59 languages: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/GoogleIndianLanguages.webp Looking these languages up on Ethnologue and Wikipedia tells us that some of them have as many as 10 to 20 million speakers (details below), so they're far from extinct. And it's misleading to say that they "have been recorded digitally by Google for first time" — for example, the Wikipedia article for Bajjika says that "Lakshmi Elthin Hammar Angna (2009) was the first formal feature film in Bajjika. Sajan Aiha Doli le ke came after that". And YouTube has quite a few items partly or entirely in Bajjika, including a Bajjika Channel.
Of course, some of the cited languages are smaller — thus Wikipedia says that Duruwa has 18,151 speakers, while Ethnologue give the number as 12,000. And the motivation for the Google project is that all of these languages are (or were) "under documented" or "under resourced", in the sense that they lack the digital resources needed for robust modern language technologies such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, text understanding, and so on. And there's a general concern that this situation makes language potentially "endangered" and thus at risk of being lost.
It's possible that Indian English generally uses "lost language" in this sense, though I'm guessing that the author of the article (or someone else in the editorial chain) made the choice.
Anyhow, it's worth spending a few minutes on a widely-used attempt to clarify the relevant terminology — the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS), originally proposed in M. Paul Lewis and Gary Simons, "Assessing endangerment: expanding Fishman’s GIDShttp://ipv6.lingv.ro/RRL%202%202010%20art01Lewis.pdf" (2010):
ABSTRACT: Fishman’s 8-level Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) has served as the seminal and best-known evaluative framework of language endangerment for nearly two decades. It has provided the theoretical underpinnings for most practitioners of language revitalization. More recently, UNESCO has developed a 6-level scale of endangerment. Ethnologue uses yet another set of five categories to characterize language vitality. In this paper, these three evaluative systems [...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
round down
If you round a number or an amount down to a certain level such as a whole number or the nearest dollar, you bring it down to that level.
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Word of the Day
jiggle
Definition: (verb) To move or rock lightly up and down or to and fro in an unsteady, jerky manner.
Synonyms: joggle, wiggle.
Usage: He jiggled the worn key in the lock and finally got the door open.
Discuss
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2024-25 Champions League – Matchday 2
Читать полностью…
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
knock
to criticize someone or something
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Idiom of the Day
a little from column A, a little from column B
Having been formed from two distinct factors, elements, or reasons. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Beth Stelling shares how friends encouraged her to try comedy (Inside the FOD Vault Episode 1)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
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r genocide in these searches,” he said.
How has this name been rendered over time?
“Uyghur” contains sounds that aren’t easily rendered in English. When spoken, it sounds closer to “oy-gher” than “wee-ger,” as most Westerners enunciate it.
One early original source in English for the history of the region, British explorer T. D. Forsyth’s “Report of a Mission to Yarkand in 1873,” refers to the “Uighur” people. Other early spellings include “Ouighour” and “Ouigour,” derived from French and German scholars' renderings.
What is the basis for Boreham’s assertion?
Previously, China had included an “h” in the English spelling. An official directive issued on Oct. 11, 2006, from the Committee for the Language and Writing of the People’s Republic of China used “Uyghur.”
But on May 15, 2012, the China Daily, the English-language newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party, reported that the word had been officially standardized as “Uygur.”
Since then, official Chinese websites, including those of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People’s Government and Chinese embassies in the United States and Europe, have used the “Uygur” spelling.
What do experts say?
Scholars and experts on the region rejected the latest call for a spelling change.
The word “Uyghur” is one of the most commonly used terms in Turkology in the Western world, and it is also used to refer to the script known today as Old Uyghur, they say.
Similar terms, like “Afghanistan” or “Mughal Empire” are often rendered with “gh” in Western languages because the “gh” sound does not exist in English. This is why Boreham’s suggestion to remove the “h” from the English form of “Uyghur” has been widely criticized.
Timothy Grose, a professor of China studies who is an expert in ethnicity and ethnic policy in China at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, said Boreham’s dictum was “completely wrong.”
“The sound here is closer to ‘gh,’ so it is most accurately expressed with that spelling,” he said.
“It neglects that Uyghurs themselves have their own culture and their own language, and it is really the duty and obligation of others to see this language and culture for its itself and on its own terms,” he said. Juha Janhunen explains his own stance:
My preferred spelling is Uighur, pronounced Weeger [wi:gər]. Since there is no sequence /ui/ in English it becomes automatically /wi:/, which is why we also have to say "a Uighur" and not "an Uighur". An alternative would be [ju:igər], as in Buick [bju:ik], but I do not know if anyone uses this pronunciation. Marcel Erdal provides an extensive phonological-philological analysis of the problem:
The third sound in the name of the Uyghurs is pronounced as a voiced uvular fricative, like what is spelled with gh in the name of Afghanistan, phonetic symbol [ʁ]. It is quite similar to the second sound in Greek εγώ ‘I’, but that is a voiced velar fricative [γ], i.e. a bit less back than [ʁ]. There is a tradition in the west to spell these fricatives, which do not exist in the major Western European languages and therefore has no standard western spelling, with the letter combination gh; but this is just a convention. (Danes, Dutch and Ukrainians have other ways for spelling this sound.) The Italians use this letter combination for expressing the sound [g], the voiced velar stop/plosive, before front vowels, as in the proper name Gherardo.
The Septuagint scholars translating the Old Testament into Greek had this problem when transcribing the name of the city which is now, in the west, called Gaza. In Arabic, the name is غَزَّة , with the Arabic letter ghain, غ. Also already in Philistine times, there was a voiced uvular fricative in its onset, which was, in the 3rd cent. A.D., translated into Greek with the letter γ (which originally represented a stop – but I am not sure till when). Beside ghain, غ, Arabic also has a voiced uvular approximant, cain, ع. Classical Hebrew united these two sounds into the sound cain, so the Hebrew n[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: longitudinal
This word has appeared in 21 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
look for
If you are looking for something, you're trying to find it.
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Word of the Day
uninitiated
Definition: (adjective) Not knowledgeable or skilled; inexperienced.
Synonyms: naive.
Usage: To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more ghastly or absurd.
Discuss
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Language Log
AI triumphs… and also fails.
Google has created an experimental — and free — system called NotebookLM. Here's its current welcome page: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/NotebookLM1.png So I gave it a link to a LLOG post that I happened to have open for an irrelevant reason: "Dogless in Albion", 9/12/2011.
And here's what it showed me next: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/NotebookLM2.png That Summary is OK, though it leaves out the main point of the post, which was to discuss Martin Kay's point about the puzzling role of phrasal stress in disambiguating the sentence "Dogs must be carried".
But one of the three options under "Audio Overview" was
What is the relationship between phrasal stress and the interpretation of signs using the "X must be Y" construction?
So I clicked on that option. The result was an automatically-generated podcast-style discussion:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Both the LM-generated dialog and its audio realization are really impressive. And I'm not the only one who's impressed with NotebookLM's autopodcasts — on ZDNET, David Gewirtz wrote (10/1/2024):
I am not at all religious, but when I discovered this tool, I wanted to scream, "This is the devil's work!"
When I played the audio included below for you to my editor, she slacked back, "WHAT KIND OF SORCERY IS THIS?" I've worked with her for 10 years, during which time we have slacked back and forth just about every day, and that's the first all-caps I've ever seen from her.
Later, she shared with me, "This is 100% the most terrifying thing I've seen so far in the generative AI race."
If you are at all interested in artificial intelligence, what I've found could shake you up as much as it did us. We may be at a watershed moment.
Stunningly lifelike speech and dialog system, yes. Even voice quality variation and laughter at appropriate times.
And some of the content is good — for example the robot podcasters do a good job of explaining the ambiguity under discussion in my blog post:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
But there are still problems. For example, the robots' attempt to explain the phrasal stress issue goes completely off the rails:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Zeroing in on the system's performance of the stress difference:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Where did the system get the weird idea that the way to put phrasal stress on the subject of "Dogs must be carried" is to pronounce "dogs" as /ˈdɔgz.ɛs/? Inquiring minds want to know, but are unlikely ever to learn, given the usual black-box unexplainability of contemporary AI systems.
Still, "podcasters" and similar talking-head roles may be among the jobs threatened by AI, either through complete replacement or a major increase in productivity. (And of course, human talking heads get things wrong a fair fraction of the time…)
Note: The original LLOG post should have included audio examples of Martin Kay's stress distinction, but didn't. So just in case it wasn't clear to you, here's my performance of phrasal stress on the subject:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
And on the verb:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
This is the only thing I've tried to do with notebookLM so far — future experiment will probably bring additional triumphs and additional failures.
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Learn English Through Football
Football Language: Statement Win
In this football language post we look at the phrase 'statement win' after Tottenham's win at Old Trafford at the weekend.
The post Football Language: Statement Win appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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are aligned to form an amplified and elaborated evaluative scale of 13 levels, the E(xpanded) GIDS. Any known language, including those languages for which there are no longer speakers, can be categorized by using the resulting scale (unlike the GIDS). A language can be evaluated in terms of the EGIDS by answering five key questions regarding the identity function, vehicularity, state of intergenerational language transmission, literacy acquisition status, and a societal profile of generational language use. With only minor modification the EGIDS can also be applied to languages which are being revitalized.
Here's the EGIDS table from the Wikipedia article: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/WikipediaEGIDS.png The current edition of Ethnologue offers a "Language Cloud" for each language, consisting of a scatter plot whose x-axis is the EGIDS level, and whose y-axis is the estimated number of speakers. Here's the Language Cloud for Bajjika: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BajjikaLanguageCloud.png Ethnologue's explanation of their dot colors:
* Purple = Institutional (EGIDS 0-4) — The language has been developed to the point that it is used and sustained by institutions beyond the home and community.
* Blue = Developing (EGIDS 5) — The language is in vigorous use, with literature in a standardized form being used by some though this is not yet widespread or sustainable.
* Green = Vigorous (EGIDS 6a) — The language is unstandardized and in vigorous use among all generations.
* Yellow = In trouble (EGIDS 6b-7) — Intergenerational transmission is in the process of being broken, but the child-bearing generation can still use the language so it is possible that revitalization efforts could restore transmission of the language in the home.
* Red = Dying (EGIDS 8a-9) — The only fluent users (if any) are older than child-bearing age, so it is too late to restore natural intergenerational transmission through the home; a mechanism outside the home would need to be developed.
* Black = Extinct (EGIDS 10) — The language has fallen completely out of use and no one retains a sense of ethnic identity associated with the language.
Ethnologue's Language Cloud for Duruwa uses a yellow dot: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DuruwaLanguageCloud.png I believe that Google's work on under-documented languages of India has been led by Partha Talukdar, whose LinkedIn page says "I lead the Languages group at Google DeepMind, India focusing on making LLMs work well for speakers of more number of languages. The goal is to make sure benefits of AI are available to a broader population where language is not a barrier anymore."
One of his group's relevant contributions is "IndicGenBench: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Generation Capabilities of LLMs on Indic Languages":
As large language models (LLMs) see increasing adoption across the globe, it is imperative for LLMs to be representative of the linguistic diversity of the world. India is a linguistically diverse country of 1.4 Billion people. To facilitate research on multilingual LLM evaluation, we release IndicGenBench – the largest benchmark for evaluating LLMs on user-facing generation tasks across a diverse set 29 of Indic languages covering 13 scripts and 4 language families. IndicGenBench is composed of diverse generation tasks like cross-lingual summarization, machine translation, and cross-lingual question answering. IndicGenBench extends existing benchmarks to many Indic languages through human curation providing multi-way parallel evaluation data for many under-represented Indic languages for the first time. We evaluate a wide range of proprietary and open-source LLMs including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, PaLM-2, mT5, Gemma, BLOOM and LLaMA on IndicGenBench in a variety of settings. The largest PaLM-2 models performs the best on most tasks, however, there is a significant performance gap in all languages compared to English showing that further research is needed for the development of more inclusive multilingual language[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ditch
to end a relationship with someone
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Idiom of the Day
a shame
An unfortunate situation. The term is used either in consolation or ironically. Watch the video
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Language Log
Aborted character simplification in the mid-1930s
Great piece on the materiality of language. Part of the difficulty in implementing jiantizi in Singapore was just this: for example, in 1983, years after Singapore had begun introducing jianti, the limited availability of type meant that only 70% of publishers used them. https://t.co/GB9JxiI2wD
— Chien-Wen Kung 龔建文 (@kchienw) October 4, 2024
The path to language / script reform is not always easy, even when it seems to be conceptually well planned. On the other hand, when those who support it strongly take firm, decisive action — witness the replacement of the Arabic script by the Latin alphabet propounded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (ca. 1881-1938) in Turkey — it can succeed almost overnight. One of my favorite photographs is this one of the great man going down to the villages himself to teach the people how to write with the alphabet: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/ataturk.jpg Atatürk introducing the new Turkish alphabet to the
people of Kayseri on 20 September 1928 (Wikipedia)
This is quite different from what happened in Korea, where King Sejong (1397-1450) had a brilliant idea for a superior writing system to replace the Chinese characters, but was diffident in implementing Hangul (1446). Still, centuries later, it came to fruition during the 20th century.
In 1504, the study and publication of hangul was banned by Yeonsangun. Its spread and preservation can be largely attributed to three main factors: books published for women, its use by Buddhist monks, and the introduction of Christianity in Korea in 1602. Hangul was brought into the mainstream culture in the 16th century, due to a renaissance in literature and poetry. It continued to gain popularity well into the 17th century, and gained wider use after a period of nationalism in the 19th century. In 1849, it was adopted as Korea’s national writing system, and saw its first use in official government documents. After the Treaty of 1910, hangul was outlawed again until the liberation of Korea in 1945.
(Wikipedia)
What next for hànzì 漢字 ("sinographs; Chinese characters")? Selected readings
* "Extreme simplification and phoneticization" (11/19/23)
* "Simplified vs. complicated in New York state" (3/18/16)
* "Simplified Bomb" (6/9/09)
* "Simplified vs. Complex / Traditional" (4/23/09)
* "Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters" (8/16/13)
* "Simplified characters defeat traditional characters in Ireland" (8/9/21)
* "Eruption over simplified vs. traditional characters in Hong Kong" (2/24/16)
* "'Chinese — Traditional'" (1/30/11)
* "Hangul: Joseon subservience to Ming China" 5/14/22)
* "A Dartmouth grad's contribution to the development of Hangul" (6/25/15)
* "His Coffeeness" (4/10/14) — in the comments
* "The pragmatic and innovative Choe Sejin — 15th-16th c. Korean phonetician, translator, and interpreter" (4/21/22)
* "Perso-Arabic and Sinitic Literacy" (6/19/09) — in the comments
[Thanks to Geoff Wade]
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
All great comics have to flop— let women get in on the action! (Inside the FOD Vault Episode 1)
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get through (1)
to complete a task
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Word of the Day
quaternary
Definition: (adjective) Coming next after the third and just before the fifth in position or time or degree or magnitude.
Synonyms: fourth.
Usage: The quaternary period of geologic time extends from the end of the tertiary period to the present.
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Punchlines or follower count? (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 1) #podcast #standupcomedy
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ame of the city has an cain in its onset. But the Septuagint translators, who lived in Egypt, appear to have had local knowledge about the name of the place, and did not adopt the Biblical variant (as known today, at any rate).
The 11th century Turkic scholar Maḥmūd has a number of examples for the name of the Uyghurs, which he spells with the Arabic letter ghain, غ. But Arabic generally has no [g], so the Arabs did not need a letter for writing this sound. The Persians do have the sound [g], so they invented a letter for it (adopted by the Ottomans), but Maḥmūd uses the ‘normal’ Arabic alphabet (I’m not sure the Persians actually already invented the letter for [g] in the 11th century), so he had no choice if he wanted to write a voiced velar or uvular sound.
I am not going to go here into the possibilities which the medieval Uyghurs had when using the (Indian) Brāhmī alphabet and the Semitic alphabets for naming their ethnicity and language, nor the Tang and later transcriptions of the name (discussed by Peter Zieme, a.o.); that is a big topic.
Note that Jarring, e.g., calls the language ‘Eastern Turki’; the wider modern adoption of ‘Uighur’ / ‘Uyghur’ in the West took place, I believe, not much longer than a century ago.
Based on the Uyghurs own phonology and orthography, which should it be — Uyghur or Uygur? I always use the spelling with "gh" as more respectful and, I believe, more accurate.
Selected readings
* "Xinjiang Uygur" (8/7/19)
* "4 Uygur Theater" (6/12/09)
* See here for dozens of Wikipedia articles having to do with Uyghur language, people, culture, and history. There's even a Uyghur Wikipedia that was launched in June of 2012; here's the article on Uyghur language from it.
* "Uyghur language" == simple English Wikipedia
* "Growing up Chinese in Uyghurstan" (12/26/21)
* "Uyghurstan or Uyghuristan?" (6/25/19)
* "Uyghur, Cantonese, and other valuable languages of China " (2/20/16)
* "A confusion of languages and names " (7/8/16)
* "Gibberish Uyghur " (9/28/09)
* "Uyghur basketball player " (6/24/18)
* "Uyghur as a 'dialect' — NOT" (6/28/13)
* "Uyghur as ornament " (9/19/13)
* "Uyghur language outlawed in schools of the Uyghur Autonomous Region " (8/1/17)
* "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns " (7/15/09)
* "Education in Xinjiang " (1/13/15)
* "Pulled noodles: Uyghur läghmän and Mandarin lāmiàn " (8/8/14)
* "'Carrot' in Persian, Urdu, Uyghur, Sinitic, Vietnamese, etc." (7/26/20)
* "A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns" (7/13/09)
* "Outlawed Uyghur names" (10/10/15)
* "Chinese Authorities Ban Muslim Names Among Uyghurs in Hoten" (9/24/15)
* "Yaourter" (7/21/09)
* "UIGHUR NAMES PRONOUNCED." (7/13/09) — includes this proclamation by Language Hat:
I will issue my standard disclaimer that English spellings and pronunciations are for the use and convenience of English speakers, and it is foolish and presumptuous to expect them to sound correct to speakers of other languages. I seriously doubt that a Uyghur speaker’s rendition of, say, “New York” would pass muster to an English speaker, and that’s as it should be. Different languages are different.
which he has sensibly adumbrated in diverse variations on his blog.
[h.t. Arthur Waldron]
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Language Log
Uyghur or Uygur
I'll be right up front by saying that I always spell the name as "Uyghur" because doing so helps me pronounce the name more like the way the Uyghurs themselves say their ethnonym. If I spell the name as "Uygur", it has more of a tendency to come out sounding like a slur on an American ethnic group.
"EXPLAINED: What’s the controversy over ‘Uygur’ vs ‘Uyghur’? Beijing’s use of the former ignores Uyghurs’ preference and aims to sow division: experts" By Kurban Niyaz for RFA Uyghur (2024.09.10)
Recently, a China-based New Zealander who’s a columnist for the Shanghai Daily generated a stir when he declared on X that “Uyghur” — referring to the 12 million-strong ethnic group living in northwestern China — should be spelled in English without an “h.”
Andy Boreham, who has a history of using his social media platforms to propagate Beijing’s political messages, says the word should be spelled “Uygur,” per a Chinese government directive back in 2012.
This upset linguists and Uyghur advocates alike, who said the alternative spelling was incorrect, ignored Uyghurs’ preference and played into Beijing’s attempts to divide the Uyghur people.
Boreham, whose Chinese name is An Boran, said that the use of “Uyghur” with an “h” would be banned on all social media platforms or websites published in China. “The central government has ordered it, so it must be followed,” he wrote in the Sept. 6 post.
So be it. That's that. Logic with Chinese characteristics.
But there's more to it than the CCP's ex cathedra proclamation. There's also history, culture, and phonology.
The Uyghurs are a Turkic, mostly Muslim ethnic group living in what is today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China — which Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkestan.
They trace their roots in the region back centuries. The term “Uyghur” first appears on inscriptions on standing stones in present-day Mongolia dated to the 7th century.
In recent decades, the Uyghurs have been subjected to oppression and human rights abuses by the Chinese government that the United States and other Western governments have labeled a genocide.
Since 2017, an estimated 1.8 million have been herded into concentration camps, and thousands have been imprisoned. China says the facilities are job training sites to provide skills and alleviate poverty, and that most of the camps have been shut down.
Why is this alternative spelling a big deal to Uyghurs?
Members of the mostly Muslim ethnic group overwhelmingly prefer the spelling “Uyghur” because it more closely approximates the proper orthography and pronunciation in their native language.
To propose another spelling is disrespectful — and promotes division within the Uyghur community, they say.
“A white colonialist who works for another colonial empire is trying to tell us Uyghurs how to write and read our own national name. Who does he think he is?” said Dilnur Reyhan, president of the Paris-based European Uyghur Institute.
Boreham’s assertion may seem small, but it employs a familiar tactic from the Chinese government’s playbook — to sow division, said Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, vice chairman at the World Uyghur Congress.
By trying to get some Uyghurs to embrace the spelling “Uygur” without the “h,” China wants to create a version of Uyghurs who are members of the big China family, he said, separate from other Uyghurs.
This approach aligns with China’s long-standing political slogan: “Break their roots, break their connections, and break their origin,” he said.
Similarly, China has also replaced “Tibet” in official documents with “Xizang.”
Hassan said that having two spellings would cause confusion in online searches and could hinder access to important information.
“The risk is that we could lose parts of Uyghur history, literature, traditions, and even the ongoing Uyghu[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
loaded (2)
drunk, drugged, under the influence of a mind-altering substance
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Idiom of the Day
a joy to behold
A thing, event, or experience that creates a profound sense of joy or elation in the spectator. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Beth Stelling's Favorite Emoji 😬 (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 1)
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Language Log
A "Deep-Fried Ghost" for October
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: aphorism
This word has appeared in 20 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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